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Bezos Expeditions Recovers Pieces of Apollo 11 Rockets

Posted by samzenpus on from the treasure-finder dept.

skade88 writes "Jeff Bezos has been spending his time fishing up parts of the Apollo 11 rockets. From his blog 'What an incredible adventure. We are right now onboard the Seabed Worker headed back to Cape Canaveral after finishing three weeks at sea, working almost 3 miles below the surface. We found so much. We've seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program. We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.'"

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Dammit, editors! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nothing here says there were from Apollo 11! Included in the post is the statement:

    Many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult.

    1. Re:Dammit, editors! by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm not sure how much I buy that... even partial serial numbers should be enough to determine that they pieces are likely to be from mission 'x' and not from mission 'y'. Enough partials and the level of confidence as to which mission they came from can get pretty high.

      You can also compare the recovery location to the impact point for each mission - Apollo By The Numbers has a table giving the impact locations for the S-IC and S-II stages. I'd have to plot it out to see how far apart they are, but at first glance they're modestly well scattered. (Anyone know how to convert those lat/long coordinates into WGS-84 or Google Earth coordinates?) Again, not a smoking gun but definitely a way to increase the confidence level.

    2. Re:Dammit, editors! by sahonen · · Score: 5, Informative

      The F1 engine only ever flew aboard the Saturn V, and only 13 of those were ever launched. Still not the greatest odds, but much better than 1/33.

      --
      Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
  2. Maybe not 11, but definitely Apollo by skidisk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The F1s were only used on the Apollo missions, and they were truly awesome -- they shook the ground like nothing you've ever experienced. My dad worked for NASA and we saw the flights. Even three miles away, it was scary powerful. To give you an idea, one of those F-1 has more power than 3(!) Shuttle MAIN engines -- and there were FIVE F-1s at the bottom of Saturn's first stage. So that's like fifteen shuttles taking off at once. You have no idea what that's like...